Felix Salmon

Back in March, I worried that Kickstarter was morphing into SkyMall for Vaporware. While Kickstarter is great for creative projects which can be realized by small teams, so far there’s zero evidence that it’s a good way of providing startup capital for would-be businesses. I gave an admittedly extreme example, of the kind of ultra-high-tech industry which needs much more than a Kickstarter campaign in order to succeed.

Ron Perelman might be the single most notoriously litigious billionaire in the world, and so it’s probably a bit much to expect his latest lawsuit against Larry Gagosian to have much real substance to it. But what’s fascinating, reading the vastamountofnewsandcommentary on the suit, is just how many people are taking it at face value. Even when they can’t agree on what that face value is.

from Ben Walsh:

The WSJ's Liz Rappaport and Julie Steinberg have the news that Goldman Sachs is dramatically changing its analyst program. The move is the result of a longstanding trend: fewer and fewer analysts in the investment banking and asset management divisions are staying at the firm past their initial two-year committment, and analysts are making exit plans earlier and earlier.

Is simplicity the new new thing? The front page of the new issue of Global Risk Regulator — the trade mag for central bankers around the world — features an excellent article by David Keefe about Sheila Bair, Andrew Haldane, and calls for a “return to simplicity”. Bair tells Keefe that “we’re drowning in complexity”:

Tim Kane, at the Hudson Institute, has a new paper out with a simple title: “The Collapse of Startups in Job Creation”. His paper is basically a slightly politicized version of the charts put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics last month, under the headline “Entrepreneurship and the U.S. Economy”. The first two charts are particularly striking. The first one looks at the number of startups in America — companies less than one year old.